Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (17 page)

Jill hummed and stared down at the floor where the metal bench support bolted into the cement.

I turned to my locker, pulled up my jeans with the raindrop pockets, and started to button my shirt.

“Get dressed,” I said with my back to her. “We’ll be late for the bus.”

I saw Mrs. Popsic in her office, the walls covered with Eagle Pride posters and black-and-white photographs of sports teams. I sat on the bench to pull up my socks and, as I sat there, Jill took a step—still in her bra and underwear—out into the middle of the locker room. At first I thought she was going to the fountain for a drink of water. Instead, she ran out the double swing doors and into the hallway.

The girls got quiet and watched the door swing back inside. I ran to the door and pushed it open a crack. I saw the boys’ faces. One in a striped short-sleeve shirt let his mouth fall so far open I could see his silver fillings. Dwayne, in his beige corduroys and big Confederate flag belt buckle, had an expression on his face I can only describe as gratitude. At first Jill just stood there, like a deer caught in the headlights of the boys’ stares, but then she twirled, her eyes closed, her arms swinging at her sides, her bare feet moving over the linoleum tiles. Jill’s back was white in the bright hallway lights, her spine like a string of pearls running down under her skin.

Mrs. Popsic dragged Jill into the locker room and stood beside her while she dressed, asking her over and over: Had she lost her mind? Did she think a prank like that would get her anywhere? She yanked her toward Mr. Powers’s office. When Jill came out, her face was red and wet. She told me later that Mr. Powers had threatened her with his fraternity paddle, then picked up the phone and dialed her foster mom, Mrs. Swenson. Jill begged me to ride home with her on the bus.

I couldn’t say no. Jill’s new bus had a driver who was so fat he had to enter through the back emergency door. Jill said that when he died he’d have to be buried in a piano box. The kids on bus 22 were quieter than the ones on my bus. They sat in groups talking softly to one another. We got off by the side of the road in a wooded area near a mailbox with a red reflector, and Jill took my hand as we walked up the long gravel driveway toward the black lake. The wind off the water was cold and damp. My legs goose-pimpled under my pants.

The single-story house had a wreath made of plastic flowers on the door, an American flag flying from a pole in the yard, and, on each side of the porch, silver balls sitting atop concrete pedestals. Mrs. Swenson, a woman with short frosted hair, answered the door. She was wearing a Christmas sweater.

She told me to wait in the living room while she and Jill talked.

I called my mom and told her I was at Jill’s, then I sat on the colonial couch and stared at the spinning wheel in one corner of the room. A big picture of the dead daughter hung over the fireplace. She was definitely a cute little girl, sitting on Santa’s lap with her uneven bangs and lopsided smile. A glass-fronted cabinet held a collection of teacups. One had a handle shaped like a lobster claw. Through the wall I heard voices, but for all the sense I could make the sounds might as well have been water. When Jill finally came out, her smile was wide and idiotic.

“That was awful.”

“I bet,” I said.

“Mrs. Swenson told me she’d been upset enough for several lifetimes and if I ever do something like that again, they’ll give me back.”

“Did you promise to do better?”

Jill nodded her head vigorously.

“I am so going to do better! I’m going to study more, really study, not just fill in the blanks of my workbooks, but try to actually learn something. I’ll find Beth and Ronnie, I’ll make a million calls if I have to. I’ll even go door-to-door with their picture. I decided while I was sitting in Mr. Powers’s office that even if God does hate our family and he has cursed us for all eternity, I’m just going to beg him for help.”

I wasn’t sure if I should advise Jill to beg God. What would my dad say? He didn’t seem to care if my brother or I said our bedtime prayers. Used to be he’d sit on
the edge of the bed and recite along with me,
Now I lay me down to sleep
, and then I’d ask God to bless my family, my doll Vicky, the old peach tree in the yard. He’d let me go on and bless anything I wanted.

“Beg him,” I said. “It’s worth a shot.”

It was all a crapshoot, as Jill used to say. I knew you could find a certain relief in begging God—it had helped me—but on the other hand, God never answered directly and that was always depressing.

“That’s not all, either,” Jill continued, almost breathless. “I’m going to write Mrs. Nixon and ask her to help seals and whales. I’m going to visit sick children in the hospital, the really sick ones that freak everybody else out, the ones with brain cancer and leukemia. Whenever I see old people I plan to go right up to them and ask if I can help carry their groceries, or help them up the steps. I am going to do a lot around here, too. I’ll start doing the laundry and maybe even cooking.”

We sat on the chilly floor and played Yahtzee, Jill jiggling the dice around in the leather cup much longer than was necessary. With all the odd smells and the calico couch, it felt like we were visiting some older relative, a great-aunt we hardly knew. The pictures on the walls were prints of barns and farm animals, and the only books the Swensons seemed to have were a book on building your vocabulary and another one on knitting. Mrs. Swenson eventually went out to her Bible study at church, instructing Jill that there were cold cuts and cans of Coke in the fridge and that
we could watch television in the basement. She said she’d drive me home when she got back. Her voice was a little weary; she was not a mean person, it said, she was trying to be reasonable.

Downstairs two La-Z-boy recliners sat in front of a big television in a wood console. Jill switched around the channels but the static was too bad to really see much of anything. In the corner was a dry bar with brown leather stools. On the bar sat a bamboo container of plastic swizzle sticks like the ones they gave out at the Fiji Island. A stack of small rooster napkins sat beside glasses with images of Easter Island.

Jill went behind the bar and lifted up a bottle filled with gold liquid.

“Don’t you think we deserve a drink?” she said, that nutty smile spreading across her features.

“I thought you were going to do better?”

“I’ll do better after we have a drink,” she said, pouring a few inches of the liquid into two of the Easter Island glasses and filling them up the rest of the way with Coke. The Coke hissed and spit, sending up a tiny wisp of steam.

“Do you really think this is a good idea?”

“Probably not,” Jill said, “but let’s do it anyway!”

After our first drink, Jill began to sing in fake French, a sort of goofy lullaby. The Coke was sweet and warm. I’d only ever had a glass of spiked eggnog, and another time, I’d snuck one of my dad’s beers, but now as my glass emptied and Jill went back to talking
about how much she hated Mrs. Popsic—in her tennis skirt and sweater with the school emblem, an eagle, on the pocket—I felt something inside me shift. It was like I was finally able to lie down after years of standing. I felt a peace I had not felt since we’d left the rectory. I understood why grown-ups drank. The stuff was like a potion in
Alice in Wonderland
, the bottle marked
EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT
.

After our second drink, Jill decided it was time to walk around the lake. She got a flashlight from a drawer and we walked out into the dark.

At first the cold felt fantastic and the lake shimmered behind the house—black, with purple and a line of silver here and there. The cold wind off the water was the Holy Spirit; it did not just flow over us, we were caught up in it. Jill walked too close to the water; once her foot slipped on the frosty dirt and she nearly fell in. I told her to come back up to the path, but she just stepped rock to rock. It was so cold I couldn’t feel the tips of my fingers, and the warm feeling in my stomach was turning into nausea. In the circle of light I could see foamy brown pond scum and sticks that had gathered against the muddy edge of the lake.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Jill asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d have to think about it.”

“My mother told me when my dad had his first wreck, the one before the one that killed him, I wouldn’t kiss him in the hospital.”

“You were probably just scared.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I still feel awful about doing my daddy like that.”

Wind rushed off the water and into my ears. Everyone believed Tilden Lake was haunted. It wasn’t just the Virgin Mary; some said a little dead girl lived at the lake bottom in a cave made of amethyst. She ate raw catfish, biting the heads off first and then peeling back the skin with her teeth. Others said they’d seen her around the lake’s edge wearing a little pink bathing suit. Jill was going out farther on the rocks, which were slick with algae and unsteady under her. She didn’t seem to care that her shoes and her pants were wet to the knees.

“Let’s go back!” I said.

Jill swung around.

“You’re not going to like what I am going to tell you,” she said. “But promise you’ll go along anyway.”

“OK,” I said, figuring she’d tell me she wanted to try to sleep in the woods, build a lean-to and start a campfire. This spot had a lot of potential. There was a fairy circle of birches and a soft patch of moss. Finally we would live off the land.

“Dwayne is going to meet us.”

“What?”

“He’s waiting at the other side of the lake.”

“Are you crazy?!”

“We’ll just say hi and come right back.”

“No way,” I said. “I’m not going.”

“Fine,” she said, “I’ll go by myself.”

She took off down the path, running. I followed her, but I was terrified at the thought of meeting Dwayne. What if he killed us, and we went down to the lake bottom and had to live with the little dead girl in her cave? I hadn’t come to a lot of conclusions about the afterlife but I didn’t want to spend it with a ghoulish toddler. The trees around us were made of black ice, and when they moved in the wind, the sound was as delicate as a dozen chandeliers. The tiny chimes had made me feel that Jill and I were changing into unicorn girls, moving through a black glass forest toward our mysterious fate. But now that it became clear that our fate was to meet Dwayne, it all seemed pointless and pathetic. Dwayne was the perpetrator of Indian handshakes and wedgies, the boy who was the best in the school at making fart sounds with his hand shoved into his underarm.

We came out of the tree line. Dwayne held up his lighter so we could see his long greasy hair and hunched shoulders encased in a circle of muzzy light. In Bent Tree I’d seen him sitting on a lawn chair in his duplex living room, watching a black-and-white television balanced on a cardboard box. His dad, a skinny man with a red nose, sold used cars at a lot out in Vinton. One time on my way to the bus stop in the morning I’d seen his dad asleep in his car, his face pressed into the glass and his legs hanging out the passenger-side window.

“You’ve come a long way, baby!” Dwayne yelled.

“It was totally dark,” Jill said. She waved her flashlight over the lake surface, showing the jagged moving water.

“Shit,” Dwayne said. “We didn’t have nothing but this lighter.” When I heard him say
we,
I realized there was someone behind him. I could make out a large expanse of shoulder, square head, creeping sideburns. He wore a black nylon jacket with a fur collar that made him look like a cop.